South Africa...'The past is another country. They do things differently there'

A feisty and lengthy comment on my Mandela post implies that my qualifications to write about Mandela and his South Africa are – well - woeful. So let me set out my stall, so to speak.

 

First up, experience.

 

I first went to SA in the 60’s. I have lived, worked and travelled in the country over a period of 50 years. I have been there during apartheid (which in the early days was of little consequence to the outside world; after all, racism was worse in the southern states of the US); during the peace process; and during Mbeki’s misrule. I have been to every province. I am qualified in South African law.

 

I have also worked in a raft of other African countries, so I can compare and contrast – up to a point.

 

The comment urges me to get with it on the history especially where Afrikaners are the topic.

 

So let’s get started.

 

There is scant understanding that South Africa is nearly as old as the US. The Dutch East India Company took possession of the Cape of Good Hope in the late 18^th century. It populated it with mainly Dutch but also French Huguenots after the abrogation  of the Treaty of Nantes and the subsequent persecution of Protestants. At that time the ’native’ population was scanty. The whites stole land from no-one. You can’t steal something that has no owner.

 

Cut to the 19^th century and the creation of Cape Colony by the British.

 

The Dutch/French settlers had begun to develop as a distinct race, not as Europeans but as the white tribe of Africa. Afrikaans morphed out of a mixture of mainly Old Dutch but also French, English, local dialects, Malay and more, although it was still described as Dutch right up to the early 20^th century.

 

‘The ‘Dutch’ as the English called them, were at the bottom of the heap in the Colony, below Asians, coloureds and blacks.     The   English masters regarded them contemptuously as lazy, dirty, ignorant, and fit for nothing except procreation. A court appearance meant the humiliation of having a black interpreter. To some extent that attitude still prevails. ‘Thick Dutchman’, rock-ape, yarpie, are common derogatory words used against Afrikaners.

 

Afrikaners were admitted to the snooty Rand Club only after Jews were let in.

 

I often wondered whether I was the only Englishman in the country who actually liked them for their congenial nature and admired them for their sheer fortitude and ability to fight against all odds.

 

Come the Great Trek. This was not because of the abolition of slavery, which was not possible in the vast empty spaces of Africa because the slaves would simply melt into the bush.

 

It was because Afrikaners had huge families. Under SA law, the land inheritance had to be divided between the sons, as is still the case in parts of Europe. So farms got progressively smaller.

 

Afrikaners were cattle men who needed large expanses of land . Their attitude was that the hard work of ploughing for crops was ‘kaffir’s work’.

 

And so they pushed off north to the Transvaal and the Free State where they ran into the next batch of immigrants arriving from the north, and so it all began.

 

Leaping forward to late in the century, the huge influx of British after the discovery of gold on the Rand led to all sorts of conflicts with the Transvaal Government and the people.

 

But the origins of the South African War – the ‘boer’ war – lay not in Rhodes’ greed to monopolise the mining industry, or not entirely. The Imperial Government was playing a political strategy.

 

It was very alarmed that the growing strength and geographical location of the Transvaal would cut Britain off from Africa to the north of the Limpopo. It was already blocked to east and west by the Portuguese.

 

The first spark was the disastrous Jameson Raid that very nearly did for Rhodes. But it was a mistake. The infamous telegram from Jameson to Rhodes contained a comma. But commas are not transmitted by telegraph. Its omission gave the message a contrary meaning. So watch your grammar!

 

The comment has a totally different perception of the conduct of the real war – horrendous atrocities and all  that hyperbole. On the contrary, this was probably the last ‘civilised’ war in which both sides conducted themselves honourably. An excellent account is given in Denys Reitz’ ‘Kommando’ which is deservedly still in print as perhaps the best description of the war from the Boer side. There was no hatred or animosity. The British soldiers had the highest regard for both the courage and the shooting-prowess of the enemy.

 

When Winston Churchill was captured (every day I used to drive past the school where he was imprisoned), he was visited  weekly by the Foreign Minister of the Transvaal, who carried a bottle of Scotch concealed in the lining of his frock coat, and gave Winnie a briefing on the progress of the war from the Boer side for Winston’s despatches to the Morning Post.

 

Not much animosity there, then.

 

(Denys Reitz became High Commissioner in London after the war. Whilst there, the regiment that had captured him presented him with the rifle that had been taken off him as a POW! He became as pro-British as that other great South African, General Smuts).

 

So now we come to that perpetually running sore, the so-called concentration camps.

 

These were not set up as an act of cruelty. Their objective was to deprive the Boers of their food source by closing down their farms. The result was the opposite, for instead of restricting their fighting season to the needs of the harvest, it released them to fight full-time.

 

The camps full of women and children were an affront and cruel abuse. Thousands died of cholera and other epidemics due to totally incompetent management by the British whom totally failed to provide proper sanitation and safe water, but it was not a deliberate act of cruelty. It caused outrage in the UK, and many prominent figures, such as Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, who was a volunteer surgeon to the military during the war, and Rudyard Kipling, condemned it out-of-hand. It brought international condemnation and support for the Boers.

 

It was an act of unbelievable stupidity that turned the tide for the enemy and made the war an international issue.

 

The truth of the matter is that Britain may have won the last battles after taking a fearful pasting in the early days (see the photos of the slaughter at Spion Kop), but the Afrikaners won the war.

 

After the Act of Union, the colonies of the Cape and Natal were merged into the Dominion of South Africa. The Afrikaners ruled from 1903 to 1994. There was never English-speaking governance again.

 

Fast forward to the 20^th Century and for the first half SA went on quietly under a relatively benign regime, apart from WW1 and 2 in which SA/Rhodesian forces acquitted themselves well in SW Africa, Tanganyika and Nyasaland in the first and, and Ethiopia (where they were the first ground troops to see action) and the Desert campaign in the second.

 

Then came 40 years of apartheid, and here we are. On the downside, security, education, health and most things Government-run are in a sorry state. On the upside, SA has a massive economy relative to the continent; for example, SABM is the second largest brewing firm in the world, and SA firms have spread all over sub-equatorial Africa

 

I had the feeling in 1994 that SA would go the way of Zimbabwe except that it would take longer because there was more to steal. I now feel more hopeful. The younger generation in Africa is rejecting the ‘big man’ approach to politics, and wants jobs, education, and clean government. The freedom fighter generation is passing and with it the old crooks who believe, with Nkrumah, that ‘you only get one chance to milk the cow’. And the Afrikaner will survive and prosper; he is a chameleon, very adept through history and culture at adapting to extreme change.

 

The ‘Mandela’ effect may be more than transitory.

 

As for white South Africans, there seem to be two choices.

 

To follow many compatriots to the UK, the US and Australia (where I live Afrikaans is the second most widely-used language).

 

Or to accept what you can’t change, change what you can, remember that you still have one of the highest standards of living, and stop living in the past.

 

‘The past is another country; they do things differently there’.